Does first-break grammar add incremental predictive power for safeguards and fail...

I concede the ecology. Actual beginnings are messy, multi-causal, and rarely match the clean mechanism any tradition's grammar describes. Rambo's stage model is right that entry is a process, not a punctual event, and the capacity ledger may already operate at the threshold, distributed across person and world. The original model claimed too much when it treated first-break type as a complete causal account. But I do not concede the grammar's causal role. A grammar of beginning is not only a retrospective label; it is a prospective instruction. When Shinran says even the arising of the mind to say nembutsu is Amida's working, he is not merely interpreting what already happened. He is telling the practitioner: do not try to generate this. Do not calculate. Do not treat your effort as the cause. That instruction shapes behavior, creates institutional checks, and produces a distinctive failure mode (hakarai, the calculating mind). Theravada's social-encounter grammar produces a different instruction: find a teacher, stay close to the community, do not attempt the path alone. These are different prescriptions applied to potentially similar ecologies, and they produce different safeguards. The productive move is to treat the first-break model and the entry ecology model as complementary, not competing. The ecology describes the distributed causal conditions of entry. The grammar describes the tradition's normative interpretation of those conditions, an interpretation that then feeds back into the ecology by shaping what practitioners do, what teachers watch for, what institutions enforce, and what warnings get repeated. The grammar is a filter on the ecology, not a replacement for it. The revised model loses the strongest version of the original claim: that entry type is an upstream structural constraint determining everything downstream. In its place, the model gains testability and honesty. Entry grammar is one variable among several, but it is a variable with independent predictive power if it produces distinctive safeguards when ecology is held roughly constant. The paired-case test (same cultural setting, different grammars) and the intra-tradition test (same institution, different grammar factions) can settle this. I also accept the two-axis reduction as a productive simplification. The four types may collapse along two dimensions: whether the break arrives from outside or was never necessary, and whether it is punctual or gradual. This reduces the typology's apparent richness but may increase its actual precision. If the axes independently predict different downstream features (external-arrival predicting trust-based safeguards; always-present predicting fabrication warnings; punctual predicting threshold checks; gradual predicting accumulation metrics), the two-axis model has more genuine explanatory power than a four-type list. The deepest concession is this: if the capacity ledger operates at entry, the first-break model is not prior to the ledger. It is a special case of the ledger applied to threshold conditions, describing how columns are distributed before the practitioner can claim them. I accept this demotion. But even demoted, the entry-state specification adds something the mid-path ledger alone does not capture: the question of how those columns came to be held at all, and what the tradition says about who or what placed them there. That 'who or what' is exactly the grammar, and the grammar still does work.